Holocaust2 :

Schuman’s report on the Holocaust may not have been the only
one to be brought to the attention of the Allies in August 1942. At
least one other independent testimony of the systematic
extermination of Jews arrived at that time. Professor Howard M
Sachar wrote:

‘The first reliable information of the ‘”Final
Solution” evidently reached the West in August 1942, when the
American Jewish leader, Stephen Wise, learned of it from Gerhard
Reigner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva.’

Schuman’s postwar efforts were centred on creating a system
that would act as a conscience for the world, instead of destructive
Nazism or selfish nationalism. Conscience provides the means for
people to live in harmony together.

Without moral progress, technical progress and industrialization
had led to industrialized mass murder. One of the most educated and
cultured societies in Europe had descended into unconscionable
barbarity. The major corporations employed slave labour and even ran
death camps. (The companies paid the SS. The slaves got nothing but
brutality and death.) White collared accountants calculated the
minimum rations for a slave to work and die of starvation within
nine months. A Judeo-Christian society had given itself over to
exterminating Jews.

To create a governmental system to act as the conscience of
Europe and make positive and irreversible progress in the moral
field was an even greater challenge than technical progress.

National governments resisted any agreement that would affect
their sovereignty. High officials in the French Foreign Ministry,
the guardian of French ‘national interest’ but more accurately
often only that of the coal and steel barons and finance, had
deliberately sabotaged his efforts at European reconciliation.

If that was true in France, in Germany the coal and steel and
other cartels had encouraged the rise of Hitler to defend their
interest. Schuman warned that the next time this happened, it would
mean world
suicide.

‘An honest man does not become a gangster in 24 hours.
Infection takes time. In thought and in conscience, he has to let
himself be drawn into temptation. He gets used to the fault before
he commits it. He descends the stairwell step by step. One day, he
finds evil has beaten him and he has lost all scruples. Democracies
do not become Nazi countries overnight. Evil progresses in an
underhand way, with a minority operating to seize what amounts to
the levers of power. One by one, freedoms are suppressed, in one
sphere then another. Public opinion is smothered, the worldwide
conscience is dulled and the national conscience asphyxiated. And
then, when everything fits in place, the Führer is installed and
this evolution continues right on to the deadly gas ovens of the
crematorium.

‘Intervention is needed before it becomes too late. A
conscience must exist somewhere which will sound the alarm to the
minds of a nation threatened by this spreading gangrene, to warn
them of the peril and to show them that they are committing
themselves to a crooked road leading far, sometimes even to
Buchenwald or to Dachau. An international jurisdiction within the
Council of Europe, a system of surveillance and guarantee, could be
this conscience, of which other countries also maybe have special
need.’

The innovation of the High Authority of the European
Coal and Steel Community or the European Commission of the later
two Communities of the Rome Treaties was made to create an impartial
and independent voice for European democracies. That is why it must
be independent, not
tied to any interest, whether national, political, commercial or
otherwise.